


A House Well Built

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Ancient Egyptian Religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-11-22
Updated: 2007-11-22
Packaged: 2018-01-25 08:03:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1640417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seshat, Lady of Scribes, watches over her people.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A House Well Built

**Author's Note:**

> With immense thanks to Seshat_Maat for beta-reading and Tigerbright for beta-sounding, reading this tale aloud. 
> 
> Written for Quinby

 

 

There was once a bright morning in the land of Egypt, a fair day a month before the time of Inundation. On that morning the goddess Seshat, lady of scribes, arose from the King's white-walled city of Memphis and went swift as thought to the sun-washed town of Hermopolis, where her husband's temple was being raised. Silent as a calm breath she laid her feet to the shaded dust of an alley; softly as a falling feather she set aside her regal finery. Off came her dress of spotted leopard-skin and her collar of gold and lapis, her heavy braided wig and her papyrus star headdress; down she laid the palm rib on which she notched the length of each King's days, and beside it her scribe's case filled with ink-stones black as midnight and red as heart's blood. Dressed now in but the simple linen gown of a maiden, her wrists looped with humble strands of blue faience beads, she lifted a basket filled with long reeds and jars of water and set it upon her shining hair, then walked from the dimness out into the sunlight towards the bustling noise of the builders.

The builders' yard was loud indeed, at first glance harried and disarrayed; masons squared off rough stones as their assistants frantically sharpened fresh copper chisels, teams of workers chanted as they dragged white limestone blocks up the great earthen ramp to the temple's half-buried ramparts, and everywhere shouting mingled with the pounding of tools and patter of feet, echoing through the dusty haze. Still, Seshat, gazing, found order in the fetching and carrying, the cycle of work and rest as teams took breaks along the shaded side.

The chief architect's footsteps thumped the earth, the bustle parting around him as a stream around a rock; he was venerable and portly, magnificently swathed in white linen, his golden collar and shaven head gleaming beneath the Sun. He pointed and he spoke in heavy, certain tones, and his cluster of apprentices and aides struggled to follow, not least with their arms full of papyrus scrolls as they jotted notes on clay tablets. Seshat walked past them, her basket balanced on her head, her feet glimmering through the dust, and she saw how the young men struggled to bring along every potentially necessary treatise and plan for building, how their servants labored behind, even more burdened by heavy panniers of clay and fistfuls of reeds.

The last and youngest of the apprentice architects, the King's young brother Henenre, cast bright eyes upon Seshat as she bore her basket past, and lifted his voice to call, "Beautiful sister, I pray you---"

But he got no further before one of his scrolls slipped from his grasp, and as he reached after it another crackled ominously in the crook of his arm. Seshat laughed merrily as a maiden might, and her light steps swiftly bore her onwards, leaving the prince Henenre to gather his scattered scrolls. She brought her reeds and water to the master draughtsman where he knelt with his son sketching in the dust, smiled upon their bowed heads, and bore a basket of bread and beer-jars to the workers on break, then walked back through the yard and between the reed bundles marking the eventual placement of the temple's pylons. This path brought her into the earthen ramp and the temple's buried precincts, but none marked her as she vanished, and the temple's builders toiled on.

So Seshat went, ever thinking, through the dark emptiness of the temple's hall, the hidden back door and the narrow streets behind, outside the town through the cultivated land, down shining paths traced by canals and across fields bristling with sunbaked stubble. Going down to the edge of the Nile she stood upon the embankment, the tender green grass waving around her feet, the built-up land sloping down to low ripples, the westering Sun pouring golden radiance upon the waters. And so Seshat stood in thought, remembering overladen scribes and prayers over lost scrolls from all the length of Egypt, until the Sun folded his wings of flame and slipped beneath the horizon as Nut's spangled blue cloak spread across the sky. When the Moon rose, round and silver as Seshat's ear-rings, she folded her legs in the scribe's manner, spread a roll of papyrus across her lap, and wrote with her black ink, column after column minutely glittering in the moonlight. All around her the night breathed and rustled, the wind brushing gently through the field-stubble and the reeds, the world asleep while the Sun journeyed through the underworld; once a baboon hooted, far in the distance, and Seshat smiled and kept to her writing.

When the Sun's impending rebirth flared coral and gold in the East, Seshat rose and held her work out at arm's length to regard it. Plans for a small house of stone, its walls lined with niches for baskets, each basket painted with a number, each number assigned to a subject. Beside her lay a chart of subjects, written out in red, listed from architecture to sculpture with spaces left for additions, for even a goddess might not see all ends. Seshat smiled her satisfaction, then rolled her scrolls, packed her case, and stepped into the air, treading lightly as joyous thought and swiftly as the breeze.

She met the King upon his barge in the fullness of the morning, his face turned to the warmth of the Sun, his eyes closed in a waking dream, his brow for this once smooth and uncreased by care. All around him his soldiers stood at attention, his servants chattered together as they waited his commands, his rowers chanted to keep their time, but the King floated resting upon the River. Seshat smiled to see him at peace as she sat beside him; touching his brow she brought him the thought of her little house where writings might dwell in safety until called for, and watched as he pondered upon it, as he opened his eyes and smiled.

She left the King to his thoughts then, being rowed up the river, and went back to Hermopolis and the grounds of her husband's temple. On her way she laid her blessing on her people: on a young boy with a smarting back struggling to learn the day's lesson beneath his teacher's gimlet eye; on the Queen's handmaiden as she recorded the linen retted and woven in the palace workshop; on a scribe in the Sun's temple of Heliopolis diligently pressing wedge-marks into purified clay, crafting a letter to the priests of Ur. Even so, she chose to find the student architects during their rest after the noontide meal, reading their scrolls and working on their mathematics together, and young prince Henenre dozing against a sun-warmed stone block, his thoughts full of the graceful maiden bearing a basket he'd seen the day before.

Seshat laughed in silence, brushing her fingertips like a cooling wisp of breeze across Henenre's brow, and brought the idea to his mind that where the maiden had stepped they might raise a little house of books where scholars might keep their scrolls and tablets, fetching them only at need. Young Henenre startled from his waking dream, blinking in the dusty shade, and his half-brother nudged his ribs with an elbow and laughed after him for dozing, until they both looked up at the echo of feminine laughter.

Seshat stepped through time and distance once more, coming to the house of the master draughtsman in the cool of the evening. The draughtsman's son sat with a last pot of beer by his elbow and a scroll in his hand, reading by a taper's light; his father sat watching him with eyes that no longer read well in the dark. Seshat lit behind him with the step of his wife and laid her hand upon his bared and wrinkled head, and his dim sight was filled with the image of his son drawing out a chart of numbers and words by which knowledge could be kept sorted, for the stonecarvers to follow as they worked the pillars of her little house. He breathed and smiled, and leaned forward to tell his vision; as his son turned his face to him, alight with eagerness, Seshat lifted her hand in blessing and stepped out into the night.

The next morning dawned clear and bright, and Seshat arose in her husband's city. She called her maidens to her, and they brought her dress of fine bleached linen and her over-robe of tawny leopard's pelt, her wide jeweled collar and her tall papyrus star crown. They wound ropes of turquoise around her wrists and hung silver discs on her ears, and thus arrayed, she went down to the temple yard again.

There Henenre was just being reproved by his master as the other apprentices hid their smiles. "Do not trouble me with your foolish fancies, royal youth," boomed the chief architect, voice carrying fully across the yard. "Open your eyes, close your mouth, and be taught." Henenre's cheeks were ruddy as pomegranates, his head bowed, and when their master turned his half-brother nudged his ribs with an elbow once more.

Then, less loudly but no less clearly, the King's voice echoed through the yard. "I should like to hear my young brother's thought, if I might."

"Majesty," said the chief architect, as the King stepped forth with his attendants behind him, as all the apprentices and the workers bowed.

Henenre looked up with hope in his face, and stammered out, "I had thought, o King my royal brother, of a house to keep the scrolls and books, here, in the temple courtyard, with the sign of the goddess Seshat above the door."

The King nodded, but asked, "How should order be kept? There are already too many writings for any one man to remember."

"With a chart, o King living forever," said the master draughtsman, his son at his right hand as they came forth. The master architect's teeth set on edge, but his apprentices turned towards the master draughtsman and the King, as they spoke of the making of the house, till they both knelt in the dust sketching plans.

Henenre stood silent now, listening and smiling; his half-brother, caught up in eagerness, exclaimed, "This house shall last for a thousand years!" Some of his fellows murmured agreement. "Ten thousand!" said another of the apprentices, to cheers and an indulgent nod from the King.

Seshat smiled and stepped from the shadow, drawing light around herself. "Build it well," she said, speaking to them Fate's words transcribed by her husband's hand, "and it will last when even the gods are not."

The men turned to her frowning, some parting their lips to speak reproof, but they saw before them the goddess glimmering in the morning, her dress pale as moonlight, her over-dress burnished gold spotted with rich darkness, her jewels sparkling stars and polished fragments of sky, her silver earrings and star headdress radiant even in the light of day. They fell to their knees, eyes down before her brightness, and young Henenre, recognizing her, could not suppress a gasp of wonder.

"Rise," Seshat told them, her hands light on the shoulders of the master draughtsman and the King; they stood to the rustle of mighty wings, the flare of brilliance, and when their dazzled eyes could see again, her husband stood beside her, the tall Thoth, lord of writing and wisdom.

He smiled upon his wife, taking her hand, and she smiled up at him in return. "So you would raise a house of books?" he asked, and her smile widened so her teeth shone.

"I would, my husband," she replied. "Words, skillfully written and properly housed, may yet endure when all else has failed."

"That they may indeed." He stretched out his other hand with his scribal case, and the sign for a house appeared around the gathered men, a deep furrow in the dust. "Build it here."

Seshat nodded, and inclined her hand to young Henenre. "By his design."

As Henenre stared up with shining eyes, his brother the King bowed deeply to the divine couple before him, saying, "My Lord and my Lady, it shall be well built."

So it was that the House of Books was first laid out and built, sacred to all the scribes of Egypt; it was enlarged by Henenre when he came to the throne and again in honor of each of his thirty-year jubilees. But how he came to be King, and the length and might of his reign, shall make a tale for another day.

 

 

 


End file.
